We all nurse private ambitions. Essam Ahmed Eid, a 53-year-old Egyptian man living in Vegas and dealing poker at the Bellagio, dreamed of becoming a hit man. He longed to take off the casino clown suit, the Nehru shirt and simpering smile — and replace them with a gun and a grimace.

So Eid did what any enterprising 21st century contract killer would: He created a Web site — www.hitmanforhire.net — and waited for the clients to come.

They did. And what happened next went so wrong, backfired so badly, that it was the subject of almost every cover article in every newspaper in the country — Ireland, that is. That’s where Eid’s final contract to kill flopped fantastically.

The story is straight supermarket thriller, full of half-predictable twists, jealous girlfriends, wealthy businessmen and Eid armed with not a gun, but poison. While several Irish newspapers have spent the past year digesting every angle of the story, the American press has largely ignored it. And so Eid is infamous in another country but has been anonymous here — until now.

What follows has been combed from Irish and U.S. court documents, as well as a mountain of international newspaper articles and correspondence with foreign reporters covering the case. Despite the mountain of papers, the rationale behind Eid’s hit man ambitions is hardly clarified by the reading. What unfolds, however, should intrigue anyone who likes to read paperback mysteries or watch people fall on their faces, because this story is a bit of both.

The Sopranos make it all look so easy.